Tutorial on Answering Questions about Images with Deep Learning
(2016)

Together with the development of more accurate methods in Computer Vision and Natural Language Understanding, holistic architectures that answer on questions about the content of real-world images have emerged. In this tutorial, we build a neural-based approach to answer questions about images. We base our tutorial on two datasets: (mostly on) DAQUAR, and (a bit on) VQA. With small tweaks the models that we present here can achieve a competitive performance on both datasets, in fact, they are among the best methods that use a combination of LSTM with a global, full frame CNN representation of an image. We hope that after reading this tutorial, the reader will be able to use Deep Learning frameworks, such as Keras and introduced Kraino, to build various architectures that will lead to a further performance improvement on this challenging task. 1 Preface In this tutorial1 we build a few architectures that can answer questions about images. The architectures are based on our two papers on this topic: Malinowski et al. [2015] and Malinowski et al. [2016]; and more broadly, on our project towards a Visual Turing Test2. In particular, an encoder-decoder perspective of Malinowski et al. [2016] allows us to effectively experiment with various design choices. For the sake of simplicity, we only consider a classification-based approach to answer questions about images, although an approach that generate answers word-by-word is also studied in the community [Malinowski et al., 2015]. In the tutorial, we mainly focus on the DAQUAR dataset [Malinowski and Fritz, 2014a], but a few possible directions to apply learnt techniques to VQA [Antol et al., 2015] are also pointed. First, we will get familiar with the task of answering questions about images, and a dataset that implements the task (due to a small size, we mainly use DAQUAR as it better serves an educational purpose that we aim at this tutorial). Next, we build a few blind models that answer questions about images without actually seeing such images. Such models already exhibit a reasonable performance as they can effectively learn various biases that exist in a dataset, which we also interpret as learning a common sense knowledge [Malinowski et al., 2015, 2016]. Subsequently, we build a few language+vision models that answer questions based on both a textual and a visual inputs. Finally, we leave the tutorial with a few possible research directions. Technical aspects The tutorial is originally written using Python Notebook, which the reader is welcome to download and use through the tutorial. Instructions necessary to run the Notebook version of this tutorial are provided in the following: https://github.com/mateuszmalinowski/visual_turing_test-tutorial. In this tutorial, we heavily use a Python code, and therefore it is expected the reader either already knows this language, or can quickly learn it. However, we made an effort to make this tutorial approachable to a wider audience. We use Kraino that is a framework prepared for this tutorial in order to simplify the development of the question answering architectures. Under the hood, it uses Theano4 [Bastien et al., 2012] and Keras5 [Chollet, 2015] – two frameworks to build Deep Learning models. We also use various CNNs representations extracted from images that can be downloaded as explained at the beginning of our Notebook tutorial. We also highlight exercises that a curious reader may attempt to solve. This tutorial was presented for the first time during the 2nd Summer School on Integrating Vision and Language: Deep Learning. http://mpii.de/visual_turing_test https://github.com/mateuszmalinowski/visual_turing_test-tutorial/blob/master/visual_ turing_test.ipynb http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/ https://keras.io 1 ar X iv :1 61 0. 01 07 6v 1 [ cs .C V ] 4 O ct 2 01 6